19 December 2012 6:17 PM

Now that all the fuss is over, and Bradley Wiggins has deservedly taken the prize as the sportsman of the year, it is time to recognise the other outstanding contributors who did so much to entertain and educate us.

Some of those to be honoured in the alternative sports personality awards may not qualify for a share of the millions in elite sports subsidies handed out by the taxpayer in order to buy a share of international glory.

Never mind. These awards are designed to show that even in an age when success depends on professionalism and big money, there are still places in the sporting pantheon for the amateurs, the chancers, the unfortunate, the confused, the clueless. And some morons.

So, in no particular order, put your hands together for…

Cycling: The van driver who was in a collision with the nation’s favourite cyclist, and whose reward was to be on the receiving end of a rebuke - described by one onlooker as ‘a bit psycho’ – from Mrs Wiggins. The unfortunate woman knew what she was in for as soon as she got out of her vehicle and looked at the fallen rider: ‘I can't believe it. Of all the people to hit, bloody Bradley Wiggins.’

A special mention for Lance Armstrong, whose shameless exploitation of his own cheating serves to highlight the scale of the real achievements of British cycling.

Athletics: Drugs cheat sprinter Dwain Chambers, who overcame a lifetime ban to run for Britain in the Olympics, following a campaign in which his manager attacked the ‘colonial arrogance’ of those who wished to see him barred. Chambers failed to make the 100 metres final, and his team were disqualified in the relay.

Cricket: Kevin Pietersen for reminding us all of the pitfalls of texting compared to good old-fashioned face-to-face abuse.

Motor racing: Romain Grosjean, Formula One’s answer to Nervous Norvus. A hero to anyone who has ever back-ended the car in front in a traffic jam.

Rugby: Chris Ashton, the England winger who insists on doing that showy swallow dive when he scores. He’s going to drop the ball one day, you mark my words.

Swimming: Took too seriously the Olympic line about taking part and not winning. Losing millions in subsidies as a result. Should recruit rugby star Manu Tuilagi, who last year added to the lustre of England’s tour of New Zealand by jumping off a ferry in Auckland harbour.

Football: A crowded field of candidates, as ever. But the plaudits go to Chelsea, who nearly destroyed the career of a referee by making allegations of racism based on evidence that failed to withstand scrutiny. That will get the attention of the next referee tempted to give decisions against Chelsea at the Bridge.

Meanwhile Serbia, where a crowd subjected black England under 21 players to an evening of vile racial abuse witnessed by thousands in person and millions on television, were fined £65,900 by European football authorities – rather less than a week’s wages for a number of Chelsea players.

The Don Howe special prize for Boring Boring Football goes to Arsene Wenger, who didn’t win anything, again, qualified for Europe, again, and then sold his best player, again.

Women’s Handball: Team GB, who sadly came bottom of their Olympic qualifying group, with the traditional nul points. But, given the team was recruited on the basis of anyone-got-boots-and-fancy-a-game, and the British Handball Association was advertising for players less than a year before the tournament, the Played Five record in the group table was an achievement.

Torchbearing: Will.i.am, for his dedication to using the Olympic torch run to try to plug a sinking TV talent show. Taunton may never see anything so desperate again.

The Jessica Ennis Award for Overstated Femininity: Goes to Jessica Ennis, for the silly pink creation she wore on the Graham Norton Show. OK Jess, we got the message.

Darts: Nathan Grindal, a 33-year-old labourer ejected from the audience at the televised Cash Converters Players’ Championship in Minehead after the rest of the crowd decided he looked like Jesus and began to chant accordingly. A spokesman for the Professional Darts Corporation explained that crowd members are encouraged to boost the atmosphere at a match and ‘the fact they can buy four-pint pitchers certainly helps.’

Alternative Sports Personality of the Year: Whoever, sometime in the New Year, becomes the next Chelsea manager. I know a teenager who applied for it because he wants a temporary job over Christmas.

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10 December 2012 6:57 PM

Is it the endless recession? Is it the glum weather? I don’t know, but whatever the reason we seem to have arrived in the season of the scapegoat.

Everybody is looking for somebody to blame for everything that goes wrong.

The prize for pointless crimehunting goes to Labour MP Austin Mitchell, who reckons there is an elephant in the room in the scandal over the tax affairs of Starbucks, Amazon and Google.

You should always watch for someone who uses phrases like ‘the elephant in the room’ to mean something important that nobody talks about. I don’t know about your house, but if an elephant was hanging around in my kitchen I’m fairly certain someone would mention it.

Mr Mitchell has found signs of a pachyderm presence in the corporation tax scandal.

The elephant, in this case, is made up of the big four accounting firms, namely PwC, Deloitte, KPMG and Ernst & Young. They are, it seems, busily advising their clients on how to pay as little tax as possible.
Nobody has much sympathy for accountants. They belong to the one profession that has never ever in any circumstances managed any pretence at all to glamour.

A little more than 30 years ago, when people still believed in local bank managers, the BBC made and broadcast a drama series about one. But I can’t recollect any major Hollywood motion pictures that make heroes of accountants.

In the movies, accountants are little dry men who appear briefly to get murdered while the gangsters get on with the plot.
Perhaps Mr Mitchell sees himself as Eliot Ness and Google, Starbucks and Amazon as the modern equivalents of Al Capone.

I am not personally certain that in the final scale of villainy Google’s crimes match up to the St Valentine’s Day massacre. But I do have some sympathy for the accountants looking after their tax affairs.

‘Good morning Mr Zonglebuck. I know you are concerned about your corporation tax liability. However, as a matter of moral rectitude I must tell you that we cannot advise you on how to minimise your costs. I know that is the reason why you are paying us £10 million a year, but on this occasion our dedication to the national welfare means we cannot help, although it’s all perfectly legal.

‘Why don’t you go to Dodge and Dodger two doors down? They have a branch office in Liechtenstein and I am sure they will be able to assist you for a fee only half of what you pay to us.’

I don’t think so.

Even accountants have to think about how they will pay next year’s school fees.

I propose instead a simple scapegoat test to be put to use every time anyone wants to pick on a particular trade, profession or calling with a demand for investigation, regulation or prosecution.

You just ask: would the lawyers get away with it?

The legal profession manages to milk public money with a skill that puts the greediest duckhouse-claiming MPs to shame. There are now more lawyers in the country than police officers.

Why is that?

Here is the answer, according to a consultation paper put out by Labour’s Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer in 2005: ‘The rising trend in legal aid spending appears to match the increase in the number of lawyers. It has been suggested, particularly in relation to criminal legal aid, that
the number of lawyers is a driver that contributes to increasing legal aid spend.’

Labour tried to claw back rising legal aid spending in 1997 and 2005. The Coalition is trying again, but it remains around the £2 billion a year mark, roughly four times what it was 30 years ago in real terms.

The fat cattery goes on.

A report from Master Egan QC – Michael Egan to his mates – who is Registrar of Criminal Appeals has now found that ‘there are very many unmeritorious applications’ to the Appeal Court, and that criminal appeals without merit going before the judges are increasing in number.

He says that in criminal appeal cases, in which the lawyers are invariably on public money, he frequently finds two barristers claiming fees for the job of one.
How much does it cost us taxpayers to employ a junior counsel in an Appeal Court case?

It’s £112.50 an hour, which amounts to £4,500 for a 40-hour week or around £200,000 a year. Add 50 per cent to that for the top boys and girls.

Then there’s the little matter of referral fees. What are they?

It’s when a barrister bungs a solicitor to guarantee him or herself a fat cut of no-win no-fee compensation culture work. Sometimes to the extent of a fifth of the brief’s fee.
What this does is pad the costs to the client or the loser in the case, often the taxpayer, while fooling the client who thinks he or she is getting independent top-level advice from their advocate.

What does the chairman of the Criminal Bar Association have to say about it?

Its chairman Michael Turner QC said in a speech the other day: ‘Public money being used by barristers to pay solicitors to instruct them, solicitors paying clients to instruct them. It is not fair competition, it is a crime under this Government’s own legislation the Bribery Act.’

The Bar Council, professional body of barristers, advises: ‘The offer, promise or giving or the request, agreement to receive or acceptance of a referral fee may amount to a criminal offence under the Bribery Act 2010.’

We have yet to see a judicial inquiry into abuses in the legal profession. We do not find teams of detectives staging dawn raids on the homes of fat cat barristers. We hear no-one on the radio demanding new regulation to curb legal excesses.
I suggest that, until we do, we take a deep breath before demanding the crack of firm regulation against anybody else.

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06 December 2012 7:22 PM

We had a
couple of decades in which Decembers were muggy rather than cold and snow was
extremely unusual. We were lucky.

The new
pattern is airports closed in the weeks before Christmas because of the
terrible freezing weather, or, more precisely, a frost and dusting of snow.
Would that shut an airport in Chicago or Stockholm? Unlikely, but then they
have snowploughs and suchlike.

Our airports
don’t have much in the way of cold weather gear partly because they are still
complacent after a couple of decades of mild winters, and partly because they
have all been told to forget about snow and worry about global warming.

You’ll remember
global warming. We were all going to roast owing to the CO2 emissions, a thesis
supported by all visible scientists and all television stations.

There have
however been a number of embarrassments. Like the number of fibs that were so
inconveniently found in Al Gore’s movie, those hard-to-explain e-mails from the
climate scientists in East Anglia, and the tendency of the evidence for UN
global warming claims to melt away a lot faster than any glacier.

So global
warming has become climate change.

This means that
any old weather can be used to demonstrate that we are destroying the planet
and must do something radical, fast.

So we get
some small-scale flooding in north Wales and we have Welsh Secretary David
Jones announcing: ‘It's got to be
wondered whether in fact this is climate change manifesting itself.’

Minister, it’s cold outside.

It is pertinent to ask why whenever it rains a bit and
there are floods, that is climate change manifesting itself, but, when it’s
cold, that is nothing to do with climate change not manifesting itself.

Climate change is in many ways a lot like Aids used to be.
At the height of the Aids scare, when Whitehall warnings that everybody in
Britain was going to die failed to come true, Aids seemed to shift to places
like Africa. Millions were dying of Aids in poor countries where, conveniently,
medical services were inadequate to provide independent evidence to support the
claim.

Global warming is always happening at the poles, or in
Siberia, or in Africa, never here at home where we can see that the New Forest
has yet to turn into Mediterranean semi-desert.

That is why television environment correspondents
explaining how the icecaps are melting/polar bears are drowning/islands are
sinking/fish are drowning or whatever the claim is this week always tell you
the bad news from exotic locations.

I would like to see a new rule attached to TV climate
change scare stories: the reporter’s dateline should be accompanied by another
bar on the screen saying who paid the travel expenses. Just as reassurance to
those of us with suspicious minds.

Nowhere uncomfortable, of course – he’s in Qatar,
a state copiously equipped with suitable hotels, thanks to its vast reserves of
fossil fuels. Never mind though, it’s us Mr Barker wants to lecture.

We are going to spend nearly £3 billion putting up
windfarms and cutting carbon emissions in developing countries because
otherwise they will all be wrecked by ‘dangerous climate change’ and turn into
rogue states. ‘Ultimately we pay the price in British lives,’ Mr Barker said.

Minister, back home, it’s cold outside.

In my neighbourhood, it isn’t getting any warmer, not by a
long chalk. And for all that talk of dangerous climate change in faraway lands,
I have yet to hear that a single Indian Ocean island has slipped beneath the
waves. Not one has disappeared in 25 years of bloodcurdling threats from all
environmental campaigners.

It must be disappointing for the climate change faithful.
But are they downhearted? Not the left-wing priest who recently told us we have
55 weeks to save the world from environmental disaster. Not the chorus who have
been trying to draw parallels between the London smog of 60 years ago and CO2
emissions today.

It doesn’t take much thought to grasp the fact that smog in
British cities in the early 1950s was very poisonous, but carbon dioxide is not
poisonous at all. You only worry about it if you believe that climate change is
going to destroy our lives at some not quite precise point in the more or less
distant future.

And it’s cold outside.

My local council was one of those badly caught out in the
winter a couple of years back when they didn’t have enough salt to grit the
roads. The road system was jammed for many hours thanks to three or four inches
of snow. The boys and girls at the town hall, you see, had been busy spending
the money on other things, drawing up a carbon reduction programme costing
several hundred thousand pounds.

They believed all this stuff about how young children in
southern England would rarely see snow in their lives. When they saw snow
themselves, it came as a nasty surprise.

For the past couple of weeks, every street in my
neighbourhood has been well salted every night. They may not collect the
rubbish any more, but down at the council they have come to realise that people
need to get about the place and they get angry if the roads are blocked. It is
therefore actually quite a good idea to grit the roads.